About the Deck and Fence Business from the founder of GardenStructure.com

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Web Sites for Deck Builders - Traffic Down

Websites bring us plenty of traffic. This graph is compliments of compete.com. It is a great tool for checking on your competitors on line. I would expect it to offer a comparative snapshot... but we know it isn't perfectly accurate. (We get Much More Traffic than they indicate).

Figure out how accurate it is for your site... and those numbers will give you a fairly good guess at how your competitors are faring.

Archadeck is down 45% this year, which is understandable since they are in the US primarily. Most of their business comes from direct advertising anyhow.

Hickory Dickory Decks seems to be down 70% year over year. Maybe that's just karma for using our design work in their "Dream Deck Contest" two years in a row.

And GardenStructure.com (Our Main Site) is actually down 5% this year over last. I would call that a "Not Bad". 10 times the traffic Hickory Dickory Decks gets, and twice the traffic that Archadeck gets if you work with Compete.com's numbers.

It just means that our builders haven't seen much of a change in the number of leads they are getting even in this economy. I can say that I have a much larger pile of resumes on my desk though.

The economy affects nearly every business. When you are selling things as discretionary as Decks, Fences and Pergolas you had better be doing plenty of high value marketing--and setting yourself apart from the crowd.

We believe our Builder Group is the smartest move for a forward thinking Deck Company.

New products like under pergola canopies and new designs for fences and pergolas coming down the pipe will help us dominate all over North America.

Our Plan products are now sold at Lee Valley Tools and select "Castle Building Centers".

We have a few new builders in our group this year-- Stay tuned to see some of their fine work!